Bruce Boynton

Bruce Boynton was a civil-rights lawyer and one of the few Black criminal-defense attorneys in the region who took on Walter McMillian’s case. Alongside J. L. Chestnut, he represented McMillian as the prosecution moved toward trial, confronting a local system in which Black residents’ doubts about the case coexisted with enduring racial barriers to jury service. The account presents Boynton chiefly through this work: a lawyer whose experience mattered in a case where even an ordinary pretrial hearing could carry consequences for who would be heard and judged.

Identity and Background

Boynton practiced criminal law with Chestnut, the other Black lawyer the book identifies as available in the region. Chestnut was known for forceful advocacy and civil-rights work in the Black community; Boynton, too, had strong civil-rights credentials. His mother was a legendary activist, a family connection that placed his work within a longer movement for racial equality without making the defense merely symbolic: he was there as counsel for a defendant facing a capital prosecution.

McMillian’s family raised the money to hire the two attorneys through church donations and by financing possessions of modest value. Their decision reflected both the gravity of the charges and the limited legal choices available to a Black defendant in southern Alabama. The family had already seen local efforts fail to secure McMillian’s release. Bringing in lawyers from outside Monroe County offered experienced representation, but it also made the officials pursuing the case more hostile.

Taking on McMillian’s Case

By the time Boynton and Chestnut became involved, McMillian was confined on Holman Prison’s death row even though his trial had not yet taken place. He was frightened and disoriented, and the family’s new lawyers could not persuade local officials to release him or prevent his transfer. The account does not portray that failure as a lack of effort: the lawyers brought experience and civil-rights standing to a case in which the local authorities retained control over McMillian’s immediate fate.

The response to their appointment exposed how readily advocacy itself could be recast as suspicious. During the transfer to Holman, Sheriff Tom Tate mocked McMillian for believing that outside counsel would make a difference. Local law enforcement also treated the money raised for the lawyers as evidence that McMillian possessed a hidden fortune and led a double life. Funds gathered by relatives and through church donations were thus turned into supposed confirmation of guilt, rather than understood as an effort to secure a defense.

District Attorney Ted Pearson knew that lawyers with Chestnut and Boynton’s civil-rights experience might challenge discriminatory jury selection. That concern had become more pressing after the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky, which made it possible to challenge prosecutors’ racially discriminatory use of peremptory strikes more directly. The decision did not guarantee that Black jurors would serve; it required prosecutors to answer challenges and gave them reason to seek other ways to exclude them. The account identifies the prospect of objection, not a particular Batson ruling or a specific successful challenge by Boynton.

Jury Selection and the Pretrial Hearing

The concern was grounded in a long history. Although Monroe County was 40 percent Black, prosecutors in the South had repeatedly used jury-selection procedures to keep Black people off juries. The Supreme Court had ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding Black people from jury service was unconstitutional, yet formal prohibitions had not prevented decades of all-white juries. Discretionary peremptory strikes remained a practical barrier: for many years, the standard for proving that those strikes were racially discriminatory had made successful challenges extraordinarily difficult. McMillian, like other Black defendants in capital cases, had reason to fear that his jury might be all white or nearly all white.

In October 1987, Boynton and Chestnut appeared at a hearing on pretrial motions. They expected little from it and were concentrating on preparing for the trial scheduled to begin in February 1988. Their motion to change venue seemed particularly unlikely to succeed: Alabama courts rarely granted such requests, and refusals were seldom overturned on appeal. The motion addressed the intense publicity surrounding the murder of Ronda Morrison and the risk that local sentiment could prejudice the proceedings.

Pearson surprised the defense by agreeing that the trial should be moved because of the publicity. Judge Robert E. Lee Key granted the motion. Chestnut suspected that the judge and district attorney had already arranged the result, even as the judge proposed moving the case to a neighboring county so witnesses would not have to travel far. That possibility mattered for jury composition: most counties bordering Monroe County had substantially larger Black populations, while Baldwin County, with just 9 percent Black residents, was a marked exception. The account gives Boynton’s role as part of the defense team presenting the motion; it does not establish which lawyer spoke or what final county was selected in this moment.

Significance and Limits of the Record

Boynton’s importance in the case lies in the conjunction of practical defense work and the racial context that made that work necessary. He helped represent a man whom Black residents believed innocent, in a prosecution led by a district attorney confident he could win despite doubts about the witnesses. He and Chestnut prepared for trial while confronting the possibility that jury selection could reproduce the exclusion the law formally prohibited. Their civil-rights credentials gave Pearson reason to anticipate scrutiny, but the prospect of scrutiny did not itself remove the structural advantages available to the prosecution.

The record of Boynton’s role is concentrated in McMillian’s pretrial defense: the family’s effort to hire counsel, the failed attempt to prevent his transfer to Holman, the lawyers’ preparation for trial, and their venue motion. It shows neither a personal biography beyond his legal and activist background nor the later course of his career. Within the case, however, his presence makes visible the unequal terrain on which the defense operated: outside lawyers could bring knowledge and challenge procedure, while local officials could treat the very act of securing that representation as grounds for further suspicion.